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It’s potentially a sad end to a tale brought about very much by the fans themselves. Anyone who played Devil May Cry 4 must surely of seen how desperately the IP needed an injection of new ideas and modernisation – which is exactly what the skilful Ninja Theory achieved.

Yet the fans revolted because Capcom dared to reinvent its IP for the 21st century and dared to change the colour of Dante’s hair. It’s really very sad.

A headline suggested by a colleague: “Devil May Cry fans destroy brand out of spite.” That about covers it.

This is interesting to me.

On the one hand, Parfitt is absolutely correct. Thanks to fans not buying the game, it sold worse than expected. When you strip away motive, all that remains are cold, hard numbers.

On the other hand, this whole “fans destroy brand out of spite” line is funny only because of how spiteful it sounds; the “fans revolted because Capcom dared to reinvent its IP [...] and dared to change the colour of Dante’s hair” bit has me chuckling audibly.

If you don’t like it, so the advice goes, quit whining and just don’t buy it.

I certainly think the most effective possible protest in a capitalist economic system is to vote with one’s wallet, though I have no problem with vocalizing complaints alongside said protest.

Yet here we have an example of that very self-same thing happening right before our eyes, and now it turns out that voting with one’s wallet is actually akin to destroying a brand out of spite.

It’s almost—almost!—as if some people think game publishers are entitled to sales regardless of whether or not customers particularly care for the product.

Whatever the case, this hardly spells the end for the Devil May Cry brand, though it may cause Capcom to reconsider just how far afield they’ve taken the series. If so, the fans will have won a small victory. After all, many of them believed DmC itself was the destruction of a beloved brand.

I’m not sure I agree with that entirely—I had fun with DmC which I thought was an entertaining, if somewhat average, game—but I do think the Devil May Cry we got would have been better as a new IP entirely, or a spin-off, rather than as a reboot. As a new IP I think we could have enjoyed it as something new rather than simply compare it endlessly to something old.

DmC is a game filled with untapped potential. I’d love to see another Devil May Cry game with the same graphics, the same imaginative settings, but with more of the original game’s atmosphere and depth-of-combat.

Oh, and to answer my own question (from that headline way up yonder)—in a word, yes. Fans are to blame. That’s how this crazy game is played.

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man, the way that game treats women is just irritating. Say what you will about Trish and Lady’s obvious cheesecake designs in the series, they at least were convincing as strong women and didn’t exist just to get beat up or serve as codependent to Dante.

The problem is Ninja Theory made a good game in the style of Devil May Cry however someone then went on to actually *call* it Devil May Cry and it clearly isn’t. This whole controversy is over the ‘bullshit sequel syndrome’ where people who own the rights to a franchise brand name insist it’s used regardless of it having any relevance. If the reboot had been called Nephilim it would have sold well, been reviewed well with a passing reference to it’s similarity to DMC but otherwise full of praise. Instead we get idiots like Parfitt stirring up controversy about hair while utterly missing the point.

So the media that supposedly appreciates DmC, which contains speaking out against corporate control as a theme, mimics The Raptor News Network when the game receives no consumer support? Bottom line, you can’t praise the game while patronizing the fans on this one without contradicting yourself.

Though on a more serious note, we knew this. Plenty of gamers published exactly what the gaming journalism experience would be before the DmC ride even began. They guessed the scores, the buzzwords that would be used in the reviews, and the dismissal of valid criticism in favor of the more juvenile hair argument. Journalists, especially in the last year, have become a completely known quantity.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? Video game journalists are almost never on the “side” of the fans, so to speak; they toe the corporate line and seem almost subservient to publishers. Promoting games is one thing, but many times it seems to go far beyond that.

To me it doesn’t matter whether or not they’re serving the publishers. The reviews they write are useless all the same because they’re ubiquitous. Take DmC as an example. 99% of the reviews begin with the reviewer stating the controversy around the redesign. They follow that by stating that Ninja Theory has a great capacity for storytelling and continue to use hyperbole to praise the writing in DmC. After that, they describe the gameplay as more straightforward and accessible yet remaining challenging on the highest difficulty to please long time fans. Blah, blah, blah they for some reason liked the dubstep, relegate the cons all together into a single paragraph and generally conclude that DmC is an overall better game than the ones that preceded it.

It doesn’t matter to me whether that’s the writer’s honest opinion or if he was “paid off” because so few reviews deviate from this standard template or “official verdict”. Contrast this with movie reviews, as an example I recently read the reviews for Les Mis. They were generally positive but for varying reasons. The movie was praised for Tom Hooper’s directing, others said it succeeded in spite of Tom Hooper, some said the movie fails because of Tom Hooper. It was described as intimate and as grand but in general it felt as if the reviewer was sharing a personal affection, positive or negative, that he/she had with the movie. This is where review aggregates can be so useful. On Rotten Tomatoes when I see multiple reviewers give similar praise to a movie, I lend that pattern credence because they aren’t present as a rule. Those patterns, right now, are having the opposite effect for video games.

I would absolutely love it if someone would write a negative review for Fire Emblem: Awakening, a game I can’t wait to own (damn you shipping issues!). All I know about the game is a general analysis of the gameplay and that it succeeds mainly because of strong character interaction. It’s a series I’m very fond of and a game I want to like, however I want to be want to see non-standardized individual viewpoints on the same topic. I want to challenge my affection against conflicting opinions so that it will mean something. If it doesn’t hold up, then it shouldn’t hold up. Right now the game has all positive reviews on metacritic and I don’t for one second believe there isn’t one reviewer out there that doesn’t have an unfavorable opinion of it-that goes for any game. I mean, think about how impossible that is.

This is a major problem in the gaming world as a whole. Most video game journalist, like anyone have mentioned countless time before. are dependent on ad revenue from Publisher that they actually should keep watch. This depedency become more intricate as they need a FREE copy of the game they have to review from the Publisher. Can a dog barking at someone who feed them? This is why gaming journalism are actually a lapdog instead of watchdog.

This thing aren’t happening to sport journalism, or even movie journalism. I know though why it doesn’t happened to sport journalism because while they covered and dependent on revenue from specific sports, they aren’t dependent from specific sports team or indvidual. But I can’t get picture though with movie journalism. And yet it works really differently from video gaming journalism.

Video game as a whole have many things to be take care of and this is certainly one of them.